If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

You haven't posted anything yet. To participate in our discussions, you can create a new thread of reply to existing ones. We'd love to hear from you and value your WW2 knowledge.

Operation Clarion.

Feb` 22 1945;
The USAAF & RAF unleashed a maximum effort air-blitz on Germany, from massive strategic bomber attacks on city centres to zapping individual farmers standing in paddocks.. a terror attack/atrocity strafing that was an 'order of magnitude' more wide-ranging & viciously destructive than the Luftwaffe ever dealt out..not that Hitler didn't wish he could do like-wise, but dirty stuff indeed, by supposedly moral democratic standards..

Re: Operation Clarion.

"Atrocities were committed by both sides...our fighter group received orders from 8th AF to stage a maximum effort.

Our 75 Mustangs were assigned an area of 50 x 50 miles inside Germany & ordered to strafe anything that moved.

The object was to demoralize the German population. Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort on behalf of the Nazi war effort.

We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time & did it...

...I remember sitting next to Bochkay at the briefing & whispering to him: 'If we're gonna do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side.'

Re: Operation Clarion.

War is a horrible business. War is madness. If someone makes an unprovoked attack against you and threatens you with extinction or enslavement, you better believe that you will do everything in your power to stop it. If you think otherwise, you may be delusional. Remember this: if you had not been thus attacked, you would not have needed to fight back and would not have killed anyone, J.A.W. What was it they say about hindsight?

Didn't Germany start bomber attacks on city centres, from the Condor Legion in Spain which started terror bombing of civilian populations to Rotterdam to various other cities in Europe in WWII?

Do you have any evidence of pre-planned and targeted attacks on farmers standing in paddocks, which requires German farmers to remain in static positions in their paddocks for the, at least, couple of days between the recce mission and the bombing mission?

What made these farmers such high value targets compared with the usual military / industrial / transport targets? Their, in February 1945, potentially war winning production of turnips?

Or were these just random targets of opportunity, not unlike the much better planned V2 attacks on British population centres rather than British farmers standing in paddocks, not least because the German rocket targeting systems lacked even more precision than Allied bombers which, on their best day, would have been struggling to hit a paddock, never mind a farmer standing in it?

Originally Posted by J.A.W.

a terror attack/atrocity strafing that was an 'order of magnitude' more wide-ranging & viciously destructive than the Luftwaffe ever dealt out.

Don't confuse effect with desire.

Germany was stupid enough to start a bombing war without heavy bombers.

It reaped what it sowed.

No grounds for complaint.

Originally Posted by J.A.W.

not that Hitler didn't wish he could do like-wise, but dirty stuff indeed, by supposedly moral democratic standards..

I must have missed the moral democratic lecture which says that when you're being gouged in the eyes and kicked in the balls by a monstrous Nazi ****, you're not allowed to gouge his eyes and kick him in the balls.

That probably explains why, close to 40 years ago, I was on the intended receiving end of such conduct in a bar fight and got in first with what they intended to do to me, to the surprise and dismay of my several bikie assailants, and my considerable satisfaction. And surprise. People who are used to beating up other people aren't used to their victims gouging their eyes or kicking them in the balls for a change.

I suppose that makes me an immoral fascist, for standing up to ****s like that, much the same as the Allies did in much bigger and very different context in WWII in fighting the Axis powers.

Re: Operation Clarion.

"Atrocities were committed by both sides...our fighter group received orders from 8th AF to stage a maximum effort.

Our 75 Mustangs were assigned an area of 50 x 50 miles inside Germany & ordered to strafe anything that moved.

The object was to demoralize the German population. Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort on behalf of the Nazi war effort.

We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time & did it...

...I remember sitting next to Bochkay at the briefing & whispering to him: 'If we're gonna do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side.'

& thats's still my view."

Assuming that that is a correct quote from Yeager, which echoes Curtis le May's comment to the same effect, so what?

Who gives a flying **** whether or not precious pilots were asked their opinion about "actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort on behalf of the Nazi war effort"? When was the last time an infantryman, who actually fights the real war up close unlike pilots, expected to be or was asked for his opinion on the wider effect of the actions he is ordered to perform?

Re: Operation Clarion.

Delusional?
Would that term then not apply to all those who claim 'moral high-ground' in the
'good guy' Allies versus dastardly Nazis comic book-type dramas?

WWII was not a comic book-type drama.

Real people fought and real people died. Perhaps 60 million deaths.

Moral high ground?

How many death, concentration and POW camps did the Allies run which accounted for the deaths of how many millions of Jews, Russians, Gypsies, homosexuals and others?

How many British Commonwealth and American units were equivalent to the Einsatzgruppen and their works?

How many Europeans, predominantly from the East, were conscripted and enslaved to work for the Western Allies? Or was it the case that the Western Allies paid their war workers adequately and often handsomely for work done by slaves worked to the death under the Nazis?

There is a clear line between good and evil. The Nazis and the Japanese were on the wrong side of that line.

Anyone who thinks that the latter comment is wrong or culturally insensitive has no grasp of history, humanity, or justice.

Re: Operation Clarion.

JAW, are you saying that there is a moral equivalency between the attacker and the attacked? I pray you do not mean that, for if you do then a victim has no rights and no standing in this world. Oh well, you have interesting but fearfully off point of view.

Re: Operation Clarion.

Re: Operation Clarion.

Well, if a gung-ho hard-arse like Yeager can express moral qualms, & question the dirty-work [duty he didn't shirk]..
However it was noted that quite a few others 'missed' such targets of 'opportunity'.. deliberately.

As for fleets of heavy bombers, they proved to be a profligate waste of resources, & Germany could not afford the fuel for them, even if they wanted to operate them.

& what was that old 'over-kill' saying.. something along the lines of beast-killers having a duty to check that they don't become..even more beastly.. than their opponents..

Re: Operation Clarion.

"Atrocities were committed by both sides...our fighter group received orders from 8th AF to stage a maximum effort.

Our 75 Mustangs were assigned an area of 50 x 50 miles inside Germany & ordered to strafe anything that moved.

The object was to demoralize the German population. Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort on behalf of the Nazi war effort.

We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time & did it...

...I remember sitting next to Bochkay at the briefing & whispering to him: 'If we're gonna do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side.'

& thats's still my view."

We're are you sourcing this from? Did you interview Chuck Yeager yourself? Otherwise, it's a bit of a copyright thing not to supply your sources...

Re: Operation Clarion.

We're are you sourcing this from? Did you interview Chuck Yeager yourself? Otherwise, it's a bit of a copyright thing not to supply your sources...

Well the only other version of it online is also by someone named J.A.W....

Which leads me to an OFFICIAL MODERATOR WARNING:
You've got 48 hours to provide a source for that quote (online or otherwise) or retract the quote and apologise. Fabricating historical sources is something we cannot and will not accept on this site.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to differentiate between the incompetent and the merely unfortunate - Curtis E LeMay

Re: Operation Clarion.

As for fleets of heavy bombers, they proved to be a profligate waste of resources

Maybe.

But until D Day that was the only Allied means of carrying war into Germany.

The return might not have justified the loss of life on both sides, and no war ever does, but it sure as hell prevented Germany prosecuting its war the way it wanted.

Originally Posted by J.A.W.

& Germany could not afford the fuel for them, even if they wanted to operate them.

Which merely reinforces my point about the stupidity of Germany starting a bombing war when it lacked heavy bombers.

Germany's early ventures into bombing England were as much a case of hubris built on Spain and Rotterdam and Coventry when England and subsequently the USA, fairly rapidly, demonstrated that those early raids which were thought so terrible were pretty minor compared with what the Allies could launch against Germany a year or two later.

Originally Posted by J.A.W.

& what was that old 'over-kill' saying.. something along the lines of beast-killers having a duty to check that they don't become..even more beastly.. than their opponents..

When someone shows me evidence of Allied policies and conduct even remotely equivalent to the Nazis in the East and in their concentration and death camps and the Japanese in all their bestial horrors wherever they went, then maybe you've got something there.

But the simple fact is that the Allies, and certainly the Western Allies, despite various and countless transgressions at minor and local levels, were consistently vastly better behaved than their enemies towards their enemies and civilians in enemy or enemy occupied territory.

Re: Operation Clarion.

The Yeager quote is direct from his memoir.. so feel free to check it & then apologise for the needlessly oppressive threat of dire sanction..

It is true that the Western powers did not have a proudly-held ideological-based policy of extermination per the dictatorships..['area-bombing' must be a kind of subset though] but they did perpetrate some actions which did tend to 'blot the copy-book' moral stain-wise & would've been poorly regarded if carried out by the opposition.. viz, check the 'research' bombing of Monte Casino..

[By research , I mean in the sense that current Japanese whaling activities is 'research'..

Re: Operation Clarion.

The Yeager quote is direct from his memoir.. so feel free to check it & then apologise for the needlessly oppressive threat of dire sanction..

Title and page number? He appears to have written two of them.

You're not the first to be pulled up like this for suspicious quotes and you won't be the last. Banning someone for inventing history on a WW2 site would hardly be oppressive - rather I would consider it an extremely lenient response, but it has long been site policy that those providing suspicious claims/sources should be challenged by the moderators and banned if found to be inventing them.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to differentiate between the incompetent and the merely unfortunate - Curtis E LeMay